Sputterpub's Blog

I kept noticing the hair. In the front of the room around the semi-circular dais were eight council members and the mayor: all gray. The three men were lucky to have hair, for like their colleagues they were born in the late Forties or early Fifties (their female member from District 3 has thinner hair than any of them; her scalp shines through her gray wisping curls like the moon in mist). All of the council were veteran protesters from the Sixties, at least liberal and maybe libertarian. They were confronted last night by a mess of thin white kids with dreadlocks, pierced homely people with chain tattoos around their narrow calves and thread friendship bracelets around their wrists. The boys have beards like armpit hair and the girls have armpit hair like beards.

The kids all filled out speaker cards and dropped them into the wire drum. They effectively stuffed the thing, and were awarded ninety percent of the public comment time, to describe the horror, to question police procedure, to demand more rights for cyclists, to mourn (in silence) the couch. They sat up straight on the wooden chairs in the council chamber, their gnarled dusty dreads like snakes Medusa would envy, frizz-twisted ropes of yellow, tan, red, brown, black, blue and green, indignant-bouncing about the ham-handed cops, before the unstyled gray heads of the council.

So the old folks acted wise. All six women and three men leaned forward and appeared to be listening closely; then each one who spoke advised caution, early cooperation with the police, reasonable patience, and several other qualities of which they’d been entirely incapable when they themselves were young.

Personally, I thought the kids were remarkably restrained. They simply walked out of the meeting. Now here they were, discussing it on the train. Like a coincidence.

“Dude: it was bunk.” The young man slapped his own thighs for emphasis. His companion threw her leg over his. For the first time it seemed like sex. “Man,” she said.

The train accelerated as it plowed beneath the bay. I settled into the backwards feeling.

Last night the kids were fresh and passionate, but I could imagine their incipient maturity: lines without wisdom. I envisioned scalloped chins along with the glazed look of romantic amnesia, just like I could still see the youth in those stale council faces. I almost recall the councilmembers young, thin, hairy, horny. Their eyes then were like ponds; now they looked like holes in walls. Their hair then was thick and middle-parted, and their clothes were baggy and blue or tie-dyed. They were passionate about changing the world, and look: they stayed with it enough that they are now the city council. Flat-assed, weary and nostalgic, advising patience and cooperation (why, when they were your age, they walked miles to and from the demonstrations, uphill both ways). The mayor seems to have forgotten the two times she was arrested in 1970 for destruction of property. Or the almost pornographic affair she then had with the current councilmember from District 5, who at that time was married to (an older woman!) his erstwhile English professor.

I wondered how long it would take before these kids lost their memories. Imagining them cynical and sagging, I noticed them again as the young man raised his voice above the scream of the wheels on the rails.

“…a bigger couch next month,” and his companion nodded encouragingly. “Tony and Chris are meeting with the mayor this afternoon.” Those were the two held longest in jail.

The young woman leaned back, pushing her head into the high train seat. There was something about the confidence in her movement that telegraphed how strong her personality was while also exhibiting the silver ring in her navel. She led the awkward silence well last night; she might be a person coming into her own. I knew these kids were raised in the pale matriarchy established by my generation, our suburban culture of coffeepot feminism and Valium divorce. He was hitched on her for the moment like a card clipped on a bicycle spoke, but he’d probably be flung off by the force of her maturing will. That’s how it seemed to me, as I listened to their conversation and learned that it wasn’t just the couch the group lost; stuffed in its belly was nearly a quarter pound of weed and the $400 they’d collected for a new sound system. Outrage mixed with grief, till I heard the young woman ask the young man if he wanted to go for a bike ride. With a smile. Later.

For a few minutes more they sat opposite me, facing forward. I rode backwards into the day and into the city. I wouldn’t do it any other way.

So my group wants to build teacher-only affordable rental housing. In the old Urban Safari store site, near the high school and the transit center. But “teachers-only” is too discriminatory for federal funds and maybe even for money from the state. We have to go deep into the city for the subsidies we need.

I’m having a little problem with it, philosophically. I got involved because I believe in urbanism and open space and inclusion. The more I think about it, the more the dormitory-like aspect of a teacher-only residential community bothers me.

I was there because of my group but I was of mixed mind. Maybe that made me more receptive to the big deal of the meeting.

Once a month there’s a bicycle demonstration in these parts. Riders take to their machines as the evening commute begins, and for ninety minutes or so they own the streets. There’s room on the road for cars too, but drivers only enjoy the event if they maintain a sense of humor.

There was trouble during last week’s ride.

I guess it was reported in at least the local paper – maybe in the big daily too – but I missed it. It might surprise my acquaintances to know how seldom I look at the newspaper headlines compared to the puzzles or comics. Too bright to be honest, I’ve always finessed my way through discussions of current events. My attention becomes deficient around the passive voice, so sociology and history were never my subjects, and government is not my work. With my attempts at nonprofit building I feel like I’m now surrounded by polysyllabics; lately my mission seems to be to give smart building an active voice as much as it is to erect anything.

The riders assembled as usual last Friday. Most of them were young and in their customary garb. A few wore outlandish hard-to-pedal get-ups, or rode bikes festooned in bells and streamers, on wheels embellished with crepe paper, tennis balls, playing cards. And there was the couch.

Towed by two old black ten-speeds, what had begun life as a cheap livingroom couch had since been wheeled and motored, and was capable of rolling along fully loaded (four people) on flat ground, at about eight mph without assistance, and about fourteen mph with.

The couch had nubby brown-green upholstery covered with an India print bedspread. Its short wooden legs peeked out from under a box-pleated skirt. Last Friday it had two small men and two large women on it, feet together on the traces to the bikes, drinking iced tea.

The police showed up for the ride as well.

For some reason that still isn’t clear to me, the cops were wearing riot gear. Their choice of apparel probably accelerated the conflict; soon after that at least one fire was set in a metal garbage can. There are reports of the police then herding folks toward the trouble, clubbing some people, dragging others. Arresting them for unlawful assembly without declaring the assembly unlawful. A parked police car was overturned, its windows smashed. That’s when the cops seized the couch and had it crushed in a following garbage truck. Also the two black ten-speed bikes.

Kids were arrested. For unlawful assembly and resisting arrest, some were held till an hour before they were due to be arraigned and then dismissed: having served four days, or twice as long as they would have if convicted on either charge.

It seemed like old times. The cops appeared to be in the wrong. Kids came to the city council meeting last night to complain.

This young couple were prominent in the group of cyclists clustered at the left front of the room. She was conspicuous first by gender – one of only three females among at least twenty kids – and also for a kind of vehement serenity; she simmered with anger but maintained a surprising poise. He stood out because he was so notably indignant about the cops’ actions. He fumbled his words and spat a little when he addressed the council, but they had to respect his passion. It reminded me of me, us, those council folks thirty years ago, sweating with passionate intensity, meaning it all, of course, but enjoying the sex afterwards anyway.

I like to ride the train facing backwards. Those seats are less popular so they’re more likely available. The ride is realistically mysterious.

I learned thirty years ago that the ancient Greeks viewed themselves as moving backwards through life. Their very language choreographed the metaphor; existence was a journey one made into the unknown, ever seeing one’s past, as if one were backing up into the future. Our English is the opposite. We walk into the future. We speak as if we see ourselves facing tomorrow with the past at our backs. This seems an inaccurate perspective…

I sat backwards this morning, with the immediate past before me. It just happened I took a seat opposite a young couple who had been at the city council meeting last night. I recognized them at once, with their dusty rope-hair under kerchiefs, their silver rings and worn cloth shoes, but they hardly noticed me. I’m middle-aged and looked asleep behind my dark glasses; I was just a barrier to their use of my seat as a footrest.

I couldn’t tell last night or this morning if they were a couple. They seemed straight, and intimate like they lived in the same house or something, but I couldn’t read whether they were lovers. They sat angled toward each other, knees touching, but they used their hands to gesture and they didn’t seem to look in each other’s eyes.

They conversed with some enthusiasm. His voice was deeper than hers but she wasn’t squeaky, and his cracked a little with passion as he got going. She was quieter, but then she was the one who last night dedicated one hundred sixty seconds of her three free-speech minutes to silence, in honor of a dead couch.

“She’s a fuckin’ witch,” the young man said to his companion, and it took me a few moments to figure out he was referring to the mayor. “She’s like: ‘I understand: I too marched for free speech. But you should coordinate with the police?’ What’s that about?” He shook his head and his dark hair flopped about his shoulders. It grew in curls contained by a black-and-white scarf. He had a beard too, full eyebrows and hairy forearms, but he was slim and not more than five foot ten.

“I know. I know.” The young woman murmured agreement. Like her mothers before her she smiled reassuringly. Made it a little better. Made herself a little place. “It was fucked,” came her low contralto. She patted his knee, squirmed back in her seat, tossed her head till the rings moved in her eyebrow and her lobes. Her ash-blonde hair wormed beneath a faded purple bandanna, burst like bent organ pipes over her nape. She moved her hand back to pick at the white threads edging the knee-hole in her jeans. “And what about the balding bitch in the polyester?” she referred unkindly to the councilwoman from District 3. “‘I respect your right to protest,’” she mimicked in a singsong kindergarten chant, “‘but when you set those fires, then you kids went too far.’ Like a street bonfire is the same as destruction of personal property! As if we did anything really wrong!”

Their dialogue was entertaining, but it wouldn’t have made any sense to me if I hadn’t seen them at the council meeting last night. I was there with my nonprofit group, lobbying for money and variances to build affordable housing. This time we were all about teachers. It seems finally to be recognized that our system doesn’t pay them enough. Sure they’re annoying whiners. True, most of them are uninspired instructors; we all went through the US public education system, some twelve to thirteen years of it, but none of us had more than three spectacular teachers. And no matter how much time they tell the rest of us they spend grading papers, their’s is not a full-time job, compared to ours…

Still, they aren’t paid much. Not enough to afford most rents around here. And that’s not right. We all agree teachers do a better job if they live and move around in the community where they work.

Maggie has been married, twice. Aggie has known men (four). Their experiences have produced Maggie’s daughter Sarah (now twenty-six, working in Philadelphia, and happily pregnant), Agatha’s two abortions, various and sundry orgasms, and individual conclusions that neither wants marriage and that Aggie probably doesn’t want a man. She may not want a woman either, that way. She thinks sex is overrated. Maggie is more highly sexed but tends to agree with her friend; American sex in the new millennium is more talk than action. Everybody’s jawing about it, making jokes and movies and surveys and studies about it, and most folks seem too old, too tired, too disappointed to actually do it.

They have sex on their minds lately, because of Sarah’s pregnancy. She’s unmarried, but she has been with Jack for two years; she’s sure about paternity. And she seems very happy right now, but Maggie wonders and Aggie worries. They know Sarah, or they remember themselves, and they are not prepared for her to remain mated.

Walking along the ridge trail, watching Diggy flush an old tennis ball from a tangle of juniper and planning a visit to Sarah before the snow gets too deep, the two old friends make a comfortable sight. Maggie is wearing a green jacket over blue jeans, striding a bit ahead of Aggie and then pausing. Aggie’s gray-blonde curls bounce over a red sweatshirt above brown cords; they are colorful under the November sun. The dog runs ahead of them and comes back with the ball, drops it slimily on Maggie’s toe, barks at her to throw.

They speak of airline schedules, but they both know what’s on Maggie’s mind. Her mother is dying. Aggie lost her mother when she was in college; only through Mag has she experienced advanced age with an elderly mom. But Maggie’s mother lives close and has been close. She had her first heart attack twelve years ago. She had her first stroke last summer. She is now in the hospital and no one expects her to come out alive. She reclines on an adjustable bed within a complex web of tubes and wires, with very little power left to choose or even speak.

Aggie has never been a hospital patient, but she was there when Maggie had complications delivering Sarah, and again when Maggie had to have an emergency hysterectomy two decades ago. They both know how sudden and utter the loss of dignity can be.

“I just can’t stand seeing her like that,” Maggie grumps, kicking a gnarled stick with the toe of her right shoe. “I want to pull all that tubing and get her out of there.”

“I know. I know,” and Aggie touches her jacket sleeve at the elbow. “But, honey, even before she went in, she was frail …” It’s true. Like a sick child Maggie’s ailing mother has become passive and sweet, her once-feisty energy submerged in some pain-laden, fear-laced condition. “At least you had her all this time.”

That strikes home with Maggie, not only because Aggie lost her mother early, but because Maggie’s own mother was unmothered at twenty-six, at Sarah’s age, when she was pregnant with Maggie.

“I guess.”

“I’m not trying to sell you on anything.” Aggie dances from foot to foot, trying to dodge Dig’s attempts to give her the filthy tennis ball. “At least you’ve been able to be close these last three decades. And thank God your dad went first.” Maggie’s father had been less than resilient, and besotted with his wife; he would have made a pathetic widower.

“Based on what your mother taught us,” Aggie concludes, “we’d be better off planning our visit to Sarah than the kidnapping of your terminal parent.”

Maggie smiles at her friend, stoops for the tennis ball, throws with a looping hook to the left. “Too bad Mom won’t be around to meet the baby. I know. I know. At least she got twenty-six years of Sarah. Infinitely more than her mother got of me.”

I guess this is it. I may last a few more days or a week, but I can feel life leaving me, like water leeching from a sponge. Like the almost-felt dissipation of a headache.

Ironic that I who spoke so much and so fast can’t talk at all at the end. Now the ideas tumble in on me that decades of projected words held at bay. Now the ideas crowd and surprise: they aren’t as oppressive as I always thought they’d be.

Here’s my girl, Mother-of-Sarah, soon-to-be-grandmother, and I can’t speak to her. I realize I’m thinking at her in Yiddish and, really, I haven’t been there for sixty years. Here’s old Aggie, who I’ve known forever, and we can only communicate with eyes and hand presses. If I weren’t so tired this would be beyond frustrating.

I’m leaving you girls. Girls. Go ahead and be happy. Be a little rash and impulsive. Do whatever it takes (no hurting). This stuff doesn’t matter. This posture, this equipment: it’s only on a body, for a short time. Make your whiles worthy.

Oh the promises we make to babies. We hold those small bodies to our chests, we kiss their big sweet heads, and we murmur that we will care for them and never never never let them be hurt. Impossible promises to warm smooth round heads.

I kissed and I promised in Yiddish, five times. Four of you live still, but to all of you I broke the promises that parents make and cannot keep. And now you, soon you, will kiss and promise to your own. In English.

I thought I would be here to meet her. Always I envisioned myself a matriarch, rewarded for all the work with a surround of graduated descendants.

Not to be. You’ll birth my last best granddaughter in five more months, and I won’t be here to meet her. I die soon, my darling, but if I didn’t have this tube in me, if I could speak, I’d probably make you another promise …

I’m too young for this. Within I am articulate. Without accent. In English. I look at you. Squeeze your hand. Feebly. The body that has worked so hard and well these sixty years is failing. I’m sorry. I meant to be helpful. I meant to be here.

I was thirty-five when you came. I thought I was done with babies, but you began and your grandmother stopped me from stopping you.

Look at you so beautiful. Your brothers are handsome, your sister can be attractive, but you are a miracle. I envision you old, two decades older than I ever will see, and I know you will always be lovely.

When you were a baby your beauty disturbed me. You were the only one born in a hospital, and for your first two years, until you began to resemble my mother, I sometimes wondered if they gave me the wrong infant. That weird experience. Half-sleep. Grayness. People wandering in and out. The robed man peering between my legs. It was better to have the babies at home. In the hospital I was treated like a body only: manipulated, worked upon, disregarded. Afterwards, though, it was good to be there. I rested then, and they brought you to me. So beautiful …

Shit. Fuck. See? I did learn the English from you and your siblings. Mostly from you. By then I had some time. I know the Anglo-Saxon. I shoveled shit. I got fucked. At sixty I have the form of a crone ninety years old, thanks to all that honest work, the successive pregnancies, the rough abortions. I repel myself but even so, I’d live longer if I could.

I’d like more time to try to get it right. There has to be more than what I’ve known.

Answers. Give me answers. Let me go to God after this, for answers. Let the baby you’re carrying, my last best granddaughter, be powerful enough to choose her men, her time. And let her have a daughter even more powerful.

I love my sons like I never loved their father (rude horny man), so much that I understand their frailty … all men’s frailty. Let my daughter’s daughter daughter rule her world.

Maggie and Aggie are sixty-something housemates. They are each now single and neither very gay, but they live together like old spouses. They co-parent Diggy the dog. Hot-Diggity is the retriever’s full name, but they started calling him Diggity when he was a romping puppy, and that elided to Dig or Diggy in short time.

Neither gay but gray. They are aging urban white women in the year 2010, so they live in gray areas. Maggie is straight, really, but many women assume she’s a dyke. Aggie is more gay that straight, if truth be told, but not sexual enough for it to matter anyway. They’re long-time best friends, and each dreams occasionally about the possibility of a relationship with someone she’s not yet met, but most of the world assumes they’re a couple, and women couples are known for seldom-sex anyway, so maybe there isn’t much difference between a complacent heterosexual marriage and the Maggie&Aggie menage.

They look mismatched. Maggie is tall, small-breasted and broad-hipped, originally brunette, with unusual olive green eyes (like her maternal grandmother’s, for whom she is named and who died while she was in utero). She tends to walk fast and use her long stride; alone she will cover a mile in sixteen minutes. Agatha is just an inch over five feet, buxom, and naturally sedentary. She has watery blue eyes and hair that was once bewitchingly blonde and curly. She walks for companionship, not exercise, and Maggie always has to shorten her stride or pause frequently while Aggie catches up. Diggy of course runs ahead or lags behind, leash environment permitting. Diggy doesn’t hunt or herd or even dig. He lives to retrieve any and every thing thrown, and appears to understand his mistresses.

What Margaret and Agatha have, what binds them more strongly than love&marriage, is an active respect for each other and a shorthand method of communication. They needn’t complete sentences. Their conversation is on a different plane than their talk with other people. They seldom misunderstand each other.

They’re like found identical twins. Separated at birth (Maggie to the San Francisco Bay Area and Aggie to upstate New York), surgically altered to appear unalike. It isn’t that one feels pain if the other burns herself: nothing that simple. Rather, it’s that if one burns herself, she only has to articulate a few words about how interesting the pain is, before the other fully comprehends. Everyone else they know would just say “ouch,” or would take their sentences as elaborate complaints, but Maggie&Aggie find their own discomforts undesirable yet interesting.